By the Pricking of My Thumbs - Agatha Christie [76]
‘Mrs Cocoa–Mrs Moody–told Aunt Ada that she recognized someone at Sunny Ridge–someone connected with ‘criminal activities’. I think the criminal activities are connected with the picture and with the house by the canal, and a child who perhaps was killed there.’
‘Aunt Ada admired Mrs Lancaster’s picture–and Mrs Lancaster gave it to her–and perhaps she talked about it–where she got it, or who had given it to her, and where the house was–’
‘Mrs Moody was bumped off because she definitely recognized someone who had been “connected with criminal activities”.’
‘Tell me again about your conversation with Dr Murray,’ said Tuppence. ‘After telling you about Mrs Cocoa, he went on to talk about certain types of killers, giving examples of real life cases. One was a woman who ran a nursing home for elderly patients–I remember reading about it vaguely, though I can’t remember the woman’s name. But the idea was that they made over what money they had to her, and then they lived there until they died, well fed and looked after, and without any money worries. And they were very happy–only they usually died well within a year–quite peacefully in their sleep. And at last people began to notice. She was tried and convicted of murder–But had no conscience pangs and protested that what she had done was really a kindness to the old dears.’
‘Yes. That’s right,’ said Tommy. ‘I can’t remember the name of the woman now.’
‘Well, never mind about that,’ said Tuppence. ‘And then he cited another case. A case of a woman, a domestic worker or a cook or a housekeeper. She used to go into service into different families. Sometimes nothing happened, I believe, and sometimes it was a kind of mass poisoning. Food poisoning, it was supposed to be. All with quite reasonable symptoms. Some people recovering.’
‘She used to prepare sandwiches,’ said Tommy, ‘and make them up into packets and send them out for picnics with them. She was very nice and very devoted and she used to get, if it was a mass poisoning, some of the symptoms and signs herself. Probably exaggerating their effect. Then she’d go away after that and she’d take another place, in quite a different part of England. It went on for some years.’
‘That’s right, yes. Nobody, I believe, has ever been able to understand why she did it. Did she get a sort of addiction for it–a sort of habit of it? Was it fun for her? Nobody really ever knew. She never seems to have had any personal malice for any of the people whose deaths she seems to have caused. Bit wrong in the top storey?’
‘Yes. I think she must have been, though I suppose one of the trick cyclists would probably do a great deal of analysis and find out it had all something to do with a canary of a family she’d known years and years ago as a child who had given her a shock or upset her or something. But anyway, that’s the sort of thing it was.’
‘The third one was queerer still,’ said Tommy. ‘A French woman. A woman who’d suffered terribly from the loss of her husband and her child. She was brokenhearted and she was an angel of mercy.’
‘That’s right,’ said Tuppence, ‘I remember. They called her the angel of whatever the village was. Givon or something like that. She went to all the neighbours and nursed them when they were ill. Particularly she used to go to children when they were ill. She nursed them devotedly. But sooner or later, after apparently a slight recovery, they grew much worse and died. She spent hours crying and went to the funeral crying and everybody said they wouldn’t know what they’d have done without the angel who’d nursed their darlings and done everything she could.’
‘Why do you want to go over all this again, Tuppence?’
‘Because I wondered if Dr Murray had a reason for mentioning them.’
‘You mean he connected–’
‘I think he connected up three classical cases that are well known, and tried them on, as it were, like a glove, to see if